Author Archives: David Truss

Phishing for your money

On Tuesday I received this almost real looking letter in the mail:

It’s a rather simple scam. First, tell me in a letter that someone has changed my personal information, and get me scared that someone has already gotten into my bank account. Second, have me phone them and ask for my reference number, so that they can call me by name before I even tell them who I am, making me believe that I’m talking to the fraud department of the bank. Next, ask for me to confirm who I am ‘for security reasons’ by asking information that they want to learn about me, so that they can pretend to be me and access my bank account.

I don’t know how these people live with themselves? They make an occupation out of tricking and stealing from innocent people. These scammers disrupt people’s lives, and some of them even break people‘s hearts. And it seems to be something that is getting more rather than less common.

It was after hours and so I contacted the bank via a Twitter direct message. Then through a rather painful process that took way too long, I finally sent a link to a digital copy of the letter to them (the person seeing my Twitter message was seeing it in a chat format with no images, despite my sharing the image in the original message). I got a thank you and a generic warning about how not to be scammed from them. The thing is, although it didn’t fool me, I’m sure this will fool someone who is panicked enough to share too much information with the scammers, thinking they are talking to their bank.

Why wouldn’t the bank immediately be in touch with the phone company to cancel the phone numbers? Why wouldn’t the police be involved too, tracking the phone number? I bet a disproportionate number of elderly are fooled by these scams. I bet the number of these scams that work are greater than we would guess.

Be aware of scams like these. Sign in to your account and check the information rather than calling. Call phone numbers that you can find on bank websites rather than in letters. We unfortunately need to start out cynical rather than trusting when we receive phone calls, emails, and letters like this… and not like this, because the next scam is probably going to be more elaborate, authentic looking or sounding, and tricky.

Monkey brain meditation

Six times I had to back up my guided meditation today. I was instructed to breath naturally and count my breaths for one minute. A seemingly simple task, but not for my monkey brain.

In… out, one, in… out, two, in… and drift into thinking about something else and don’t notice. My 6th time I got to fourteen, but might have missed one around 12. Before that try, I didn’t make it past five breaths before my meandering mind wandered off thinking of something irrelevant and unimportant.

You would think my 3rd, 4th, and 5th attempts would have been more successful, after all, I only had one task to do, and only for a minute. But like the dog in the movie ‘Up’, my mind was pulled away, attracted by squirrels, no mater what I was trying to focus on. I can’t even remember what pulled my thoughts away, none of it important, just monkey-mind distractions, or squirrels, or whatever metaphor you prefer to describe an unfocused mind.

I just tried again and counted to 9. I’m sure that was wrong, because I don’t take 6+ second breaths. I’ve been meditating for 2 and a half years and I can’t relax my thoughts enough to count my breath for 1 minute. Perhaps 10 minutes guided meditation is not enough of a daily practice to truly quiet my mind. I’m not quitting, I’m sure there are other benefits to starting my day with this activity. But perhaps it’s time to add some silent meditation to my day as well.

I’ll start with 3 minutes, and I’ll try this now.

And for pure comedy, my cat came meowing up to me 30 seconds in, wanting me to let him out, and clawing the couch to ensure he had my attention.

Let’s go again!

Well, that wasn’t so bad. I will need to add silent meditation to my daily practice. I’ll keep it short enough at the start to ensure that I actually commit to the habit. My goal: simply to be able to sit and count my breaths for a minute, without my brain doing mental gymnastics. My date I hope to achieve this? I don’t know, I think I will just look for gradual improvements and progress, that’s probably better than an arbitrary date and the pressure that distraction would be. One less monkey thought, one less squirrel to pull my attention away… and maybe put the cat out first.

The shade of our minds

My morning meditation included this quote:

“We are sitting under the tree of our thinking minds, wondering why we’re not getting any sunshine.” ~ Ram Dass

It’s interesting to think about some of the negative loops we play in our mind:

Self doubt – I’m not good enough. I can’t do it, it’s too hard for me.

Regret – Both for the things we’ve done, and the things we wish we did.

Sadness – for things we’ve lost, for uncomfortable moments that happened in our lives, and also just in our minds.

We put up our own shade while wondering why the sun doesn’t shine on us… and we do this without ever leaving our own thoughts. But we aren’t always in control. The dark spaces can grow, the shade can seem to be daunting. Grey, stormy clouds do not allow the sun through, even if we get out from under the tree.

“Smile.”

“Snap out of it.”

“Just think happy thoughts.”

It’s so easy for someone who sees sunshine to toss out simple advice to those who are stuck in the gloomy shade. But it’s so hard to have the advice of others penetrate the shade we cast on ourselves. When we are stuck in the shade, we do not feel in control of navigating to brighter spaces in our minds. If we did… we would, if only it were so simple.

—

However it is important to remember that we are not our thoughts, our thoughts are not us. If we can recognize this, we can create some cognitive dissonance. We can separate the elements of shade we create in our heads from the shade we are experiencing. We can have doubts and still move forward, we can fake confidence and pretend we are more capable than we feel. We can act our way into a new way of thinking. We can choose to do something that reduces regrets from the things done and not done. We might not feel happy, but we can choose to see our sadness rather than live it, to observe it from a place where it does not grip us so tightly.

So easy to say, when one is not feeling down, when not depressed, when we see potential in ourselves and others… So far away from achievable when we are in the midst of shadow, gloom, and despair. We do not think our way out of bad thinking so easily, we do not break the loop from within the loop. When everything is spinning around us, it can feel like nothing stops moving even if we can stand still. We can’t un-think our own thoughts so easily.

Yet we can act differently, we can choose what to do when we can’t choose what to think. We can take a walk in nature, we can connect with a friend who makes us feel better. We can read a book that takes us to places our minds didn’t know we could go. We can dress in a way that makes us feel empowered. We can do a kind act for others and feel the endorphins that is the reward for selflessness… for not just thinking for and about ourselves.

We can exercise, not to transform our bodies but to transform our minds… not a gruelling workout to make ourselves more fit, but short spurts of activity to change our heart rate and clear some clouds. Activity vignettes that alter our physiology, and get us out of a rut.

We can pattern what we do to pattern what we think, rather than the other way around… Routines can be ruts, and routines can be grooves. We can find physical grooves that helps us out of mental ruts. We can act our way into new thinking when we can not think our way into new action… because the shade won’t think itself away, and sunshine does not fill the shadows when we choose to create our own clouds.

It’s not what we think, but what we do that makes a difference, and action is what moves us from underneath the shady trees of our minds.

Not on all cylinders

Woke up with a pounding headache this morning and not feeling 100%. Isn’t it odd that any other time but covid, I’d take a couple pain relievers (which I just did), then head off to work. I’d muscle through the day and even stay late to get things done. Pre-covid I’d also go to school with a cold and runny nose, or other flu symptoms. I wonder how any times in the past I spread my sickness, somehow thinking I was doing something good by avoiding a sick day.

No flu symptoms today, but definitely best if I stay home today… and also best if I stop looking at this screen right now. Back to sleep if my thumping brain will let me.

Dream tax

I have a buddy who I occasionally buy lottery tickets with. This isn’t something I normally do, but when the grand prize is very high, we’ll each take turns buying some tickets. It’s fun to do, and over a year, it’s not a lot of money spent. I call lottery tickets a dream tax. The reason I call it this is because I have no expectations that buying the ticket will ever win me anything more than money to buy a few more tickets. However, the buying of a ticket does give me the opportunity to dream about what I’d do with the money.

In that way, the money spent on lottery tickets is a dream tax. It’s a payment made that allows me to imagine something I wouldn’t normally dream of. A small fee that opens the part of my brain that imagines what I’d do with millions of dollars. It’s fun to dream outrageously sometimes, and for that reason, I don’t mind paying the tax every now and then.

Digital currency

In five to ten years a crisp, mint condition 50 or 100 dollar bill from the ‘late 1900’s’ will be a collector’s item. No one will be paying for anything with paper bills or coins. No one. It’s not just that we will be using credit cards and bank cards instead of cash, there won’t be any form of money that won’t be digital.

The Canadian and American dollar, and currencies from all over the world, will be digital cryptocurrencies. They won’t be like Bitcoin where every account address is public. When you pay, no one will be able to look into your account, but the money will be verified as real at the point of transaction. You will be able to instantly change currencies from one country’s currency to another, without a bank. You will also be able switch to another cryptocurrency or Visa, or MasterCard, or some form of smart contract IOU, that is staked against something you own (at a pre-determined interest rate).

Paper money will be nothing more than collectables like Magic the Gathering or Pokémon cards that are no longer printed.

It might seem crazy to think this will happen as soon as 5 years from now, but North America won’t be first. There are countries with incredible inflation that need to print larger and larger bills, making smaller bills useless. In countries like this, the cost of printing the money is hardly worth the effort. Imagine having to carry around seven to ten $50,000 bills to buy a loaf of bread! These economies will move to digital first.

But then the transition will grow exponentially. Within 10 years every nation will have a digital currency and paper money will be a thing of the past. Have any mint condition bills and coins? Keep them, they will be worth a lot more than face value for your grandchildren.

Resetting goals

I have been very good at setting long term goals for myself. My healthy living calendar is an excellent example of this. Since January 2019 I have gradually increased my daily workouts per week, and I’ve also meditated almost every single day. My goal to read or write for at least 20 minutes daily has become read and write every day since July 2019. And my goal of shooting arrows 100 days this year will be exceeded because I have already shot on more than 60 days this year. My long term targets have been hit and surpassed.

My short term goals have not been as successful. A year ago I decided I wanted to do a 30 second unsupported handstand, but my shoulder kept bugging me. I recently wanted to bulk up 10 pounds, but my eating habits have not been healthy enough to do this. I’ve wanted to work my way up to 30 pull-ups, but was stuck at 20, and although I eked out 21 on Tuesday, these last couple attempts left my upper back extremely tight. My massage therapist thinks I’m undoing a lot of the progress I’ve made in moving away from chronic discomfort/pain.

Not many 53 year-olds can walk around doing handstands, or can do 20, much less 30, pull-ups. I’ve spent 2 and a half years slowly dropping 25 pounds, and I want to add 10 healthy pounds to that, at a time when I’ve already added more muscle mass than I’ve had in 20+ years. These goals don’t make sense. They are lofty goals for someone half my age, and not goals I should be setting for myself.

All that said, while I need a reset, I also want to push myself and make some improvements. I’m just not sure what they should be? I might go back to handstands but rather than trying to push too hard and re-injure my shoulder, I’ll progress slowly, tracking gradual increases in my ability to do the preparatory exercises. Maybe instead of 30 pull-ups, I’ll work towards 3 sets of 12. And I’ll stay happy with my current weight, and maybe do something healthier like add meditation time to each day?

These are just thoughts right now, I need to think about what I really want to do, then set realistic timelines that allow me to see injury-less progress. Setting goals that stress my body out too much don’t seem to work well for me, but setting long term minimum expectation goals have worked amazingly well, and so I should really stick to what’s working.

Worthy goals

This video came up as a Facebook memory from 4 years ago.

The process of applying for an award like The Cmolik Prize for the Enhancement of Public Education in BC was rewarding because it forced us to reflect on what we do. We have really evolved as a community since this video was made, and while we don’t necessarily give students as much freedom as we have in the past, we’ve created better scaffolding to support students getting their work done… on both the school work they need to do, and the projects they want to do.

A couple recent Daily-Ink posts have focussed on the school: Students design the school about student designed and created murals; and, Obstacles become the way about a student working through a problem rather than letting that problem become an obstacle or a failure point in his project. Creating the space for these things to happen is, as Al says at the end of the video, a worthy goal. Weve fostered a pretty special community where we get to see our students thrive.

Pizza sandwich

When I want to treat myself, I have pizza for lunch. We have a Papa Leo’s Pizza that is a 3 minute walk from our school, and I love their pizza. When I go, I order two slices and they sandwich it for me. That is to say, I have them put one slice upside-down onto the other slice, to make a sandwich with both crusts on the outside. Usually it’s one Hawaiian slice and one all-meat or vegetarian. (Yes, I like pineapple on pizza.)

I don’t know when I started doing this, but it’s a regular habit for me. There are a couple things that I really enjoy about this. First, the flavour; I love pizzas with everything on them and by-the-slice pizza toppings are limited. Second, I don’t need a box, I can just use the flimsy plate they give you, and I don’t have to worry about juggling a second slice while biting into the first. I hold them like a sandwich and bite them both at the sane time. As a bonus, I don’t have to throw away a barely used box.

Is it weird? I don’t care. Delicious, convenient, and easy to eat. Give it a try.

Obstacles become the way

When I wrote Learning and Failure I struggled with the word failure. Setbacks and obstacles that some see as failures can often become the impetus for far greater learning than if the roadblock never needed to be faced.

Here is the end of the post:

“The learning potential of failure is significant. If the work is meaningful enough, there can be more learned from an epic failure, than a marginal success, where the measure for success was set too low.”

One of our students at Inquiry Hub is working on developing an artificial intelligence (AI) program that can listen to a song and determine the key of that song. The workings of this are far beyond my understanding, but in his reflection about his learning so far, (after doing a great job explaining the process), he shared this in his ‘Log of Milestones’:

– Made a python script to automatically take a mp3 file, and find its music key by making a query to Tunebat. I got blocked by Tunebat, because they identified my automated queries as an “attack” on their server.

– Wrote a Firefox web extension using javascript to make the queries to Tunebat not seem automated, and therefore not rejected. Managed to work.

And then later:

– I found there was a way on Python to fake a web request to Tunebat without getting blocked.

I love seeing this creativity and resiliency. The obstacle becomes the way. He sends hundreds of automated requests to a website, essential to give him the large amounts of data he needs to train his AI; the website sees these automated requests as an attack on their server (this is known as a DOS attack); So he writes first a web browser extension, then later a python program, that tricks the website into answering his thousands of requests without seeing them as an attack.

The roadblock or failure isn’t a failure, it’s an opportunity to adapt, be creative, and learn new skills.

F ailure

A lways

I nvites

L earning

The invitation is always there, the opportunity to overcome can become the place where amazing learning happens. A potential failure can become the impetus to build resilience and to create new and unforeseen challenges to overcome. It can become the thing that makes the learning experience a worthy experience to remember… more memorable than the easy ‘A’ on a cookie-cutter style learning experience where the outcome is uniform for all the students who jump through the same hoops to get that ‘A’.

The obstacle can be the failure point where people give up, or it can be the opportunity to overcome. The learning invitation is there, as long as the drive, resilience, and effort are there to push a student.

Sure in this example he might not have been able to fool the website, and maybe his efforts could have come up short, but I don’t think that would have stopped him anyway. His attempts at a workaround could still have provided a lot of learning that he never would have had otherwise. The obstacle became the way, and while the positive outcome this time was rewarding, so too could have been a so-called ‘failure’. There is nothing artificial about this kind of learning.